# APISR: Anime Production Inspired Real-World Anime Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01598 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01598/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (2020)
- [Efficient and Explicit Modelling of Image Hierarchies for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00748/) (2023)
- [Investigating Tradeoffs in Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12704/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Image Super-Resolution using Cycle-in-Cycle Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00437/) (2018)
- [Deep Animation Video Interpolation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02495/) (2021)
- [A Technical Overview of AV1](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06091/) (2020)
- [User-Guided Deep Anime Line Art Colorization with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03240/) (2018)
- [AnimeSR: Learning Real-World Super-Resolution Models for Animation Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07038/) (2022)
- [Improving the Perceptual Quality of 2D Animation Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12792/) (2021)
- [PAniC-3D: Stylized Single-view 3D Reconstruction from Portraits of Anime Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14587/) (2023)
- [Scenimefy: Learning to Craft Anime Scene via Semi-Supervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12968/) (2023)
- [AnimeRun: 2D Animation Visual Correspondence from Open Source 3D Movies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05709/) (2022)
- [AnimeDiffusion: Anime Face Line Drawing Colorization via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11137/) (2023)
- [A Dive into SAM Prior in Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13620/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [How to Continually Adapt Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Flexible Customization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17594/) (2024)
- [BELM: Bidirectional Explicit Linear Multi-step Sampler for Exact Inversion in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07273/) (2024)
- [ImageFlowNet: Forecasting Multiscale Image-Level Trajectories of Disease Progression with Irregularly-Sampled Longitudinal Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14794/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-Aided Joint Source Channel Coding For High Realism Wireless Image Transmission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17736/) (2024)
- [DriveDiTFit: Fine-tuning Diffusion Transformers for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15661/) (2024)
- [Frame In-N-Out: Unbounded Controllable Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21491/) (2025)
- [GenDR: Lighten Generative Detail Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06790/) (2025)
- [SIR-DIFF: Sparse Image Sets Restoration with Multi-View Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14463/) (2025)
- [UARE: A Unified Vision-Language Model for Image Quality Assessment, Restoration, and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06750/) (2025)
- [IRPO: Boosting Image Restoration via Post-training GRPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00814/) (2025)
- [Eliminating VAE for Fast and High-Resolution Generative Detail Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10630/) (2026)
- [Forget Less by Learning Together through Concept Consolidation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01963/) (2026)
- [HRR: Hierarchical Retrospection Refinement for Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17862/) (2025)
- [ExpressEdit: Fast Editing of Stylized Facial Expressions with Diffusion Models in Photoshop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03448/) (2026)
- [SEAL: Semantic-aware Single-image Sticker Personalization with a Large-scale Sticker-tag Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26883/) (2026)
- [No Pixel Left Behind: Filling Gaps in Anime Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00800/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While real-world anime super-resolution (SR) has gained increasing attention in the SR community, existing methods still adopt techniques from the photorealistic domain. In this paper, we analyze the anime production workflow and rethink how to use characteristics of it for the sake of the real-world anime SR. First, we argue that video networks and datasets are not necessary for anime SR due to the repetition use of hand-drawing frames. Instead, we propose an anime image collection pipeline by choosing the least compressed and the most informative frames from the video sources. Based on this pipeline, we introduce the Anime Production-oriented Image (API) dataset. In addition, we identify two anime-specific challenges of distorted and faint hand-drawn lines and unwanted color artifacts. We address the first issue by introducing a prediction-oriented compression module in the image degradation model and a pseudo-ground truth preparation with enhanced hand-drawn lines. In addition, we introduce the balanced twin perceptual loss combining both anime and photorealistic high-level features to mitigate unwanted color artifacts and increase visual clarity. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments on the public benchmark, showing our method outperforms state-of-the-art anime dataset-trained approaches.